Bridge concepts are those general concepts that are both viable for reinterpretation given the various field of ideas throughout intellectual history and aid in what Positivists call "reconstruction." According to Positivists, ideas must be taken from seemingly contrary intellectual camps and "bridged" together to reinterpret ancient concepts thereby generating new views of humanity's deepest abstract concerns. To bridge these contrary ideas certain concepts may be used, concepts that both contrary sets of ideas have in common: Existence, Consciousness, Ethics, Belief, Reason, etc. A possible source for these "bridge concepts" could be found in a document called "The Syntopicon," a document written as a guide to the intellectual conversation throughout human intellectual history.
"Technically, there were only 52 volumes of actual “conversation.” Two served as a kind of guide to the others; I say “a kind of guide” because to use that term for these two volumes understates their weirdness. Adler had determined—it’s not clear how—that the Great Conversation was structured by 102 different ideas: Being, Chance, Infinity, Labor, Family, and 97 more. A team of underlings scoured the Great Books, found references in them to each of the Great Ideas (as Adler naturally called them), and compiled a two-volume index that he dubbed the Syntopicon."
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc0116bb.html
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